I have a gaming confession, and an insight on game design. The confession is this:
I played one game for over 4000 hours.
You read that right. 4000+ hours. It's true. Off and on—for over 20 years—I kept coming back to the same game and playing it. A lot. Looking back, it is a little embarrassing to admit this. There is a part of me that wonders what I could have accomplished had I been more productive during those hours. Mastered a second language? Launched a second career? Cured cancer? I kid... sort of.
The way I justify it is like this: Instead of TV or novels, this game was my source of entertainment. I thoroughly enjoyed the game. My last post was about depth in games (strategy, tactics, and imagination), and this comes closest to hitting that trifecta of any game I've played.
You might think it is a game like World of Warcraft, with millions spent in finely tuned development. No, it was developed and maintained by a bunch of college kids in their spare time and transitioned into being run by volunteers.
You might think it is a widespread game that is played lots of places, like a sport, or poker, or chess. No, it is fairly niche and I would imagine at most several thousand people have ever played it.
MUDs
I'm sure you've never heard of it, but the game is called Carrion Fields. It belongs to a genre of games called Multi-User Dungeons or MUDs. To its credit, these were one of the first online multiplayer fantasy games and later inspired the development of MMORPGs.
Carrion Fields (CF) was released in 1994. Many games from the old days suffer from poor design by today's standards. Have you played Golden Axe lately? As newer and better designed games came out, players migrated. Carrion Fields suffers from many of these design issues as well, but it presents depth in those three areas better than almost any game I've ever played.
There are better strategy games, and better tactical games, and games that do both strategy and tactics better. There are better roleplaying games too. But I can't name any game that does all three better than CF.
I should mention that CF is a text game. When navigating the world, you are given a paragraph describing the area you are in, much like a traditional Game Master (GM) might. You type your commands: north, eat bread, wield sword, attack rat. That type of thing. While this does make the game intimidating for gamers not used to it, text allows for almost infinite customization.
Imaginative roleplaying
In most video games, the amount of customization is small and limited. In CF, while you pick a race and class like many other RPGs, you are able to create the paragraph describing your character. Your character could be missing an eye, smell like damp earth, and have old leaves in their tangled hair. Anyone that looked at your character would see it. You write your own character's role. You pick your motivations and goals and dreams. You could become leader of the city guards, or a thief guild's kingpin, or a myriad of other things. Only the gods/maintainers could see your role.
Aside from a newbie chat channel that allows people to ask rules questions, everything happening in the game is considered "in character". In other words, there is no talk of homework, or Star Wars, or politics, or anything happening in the outside world. The main characters and gods were all run by players and players who volunteered to maintain the game. I vividly remember exploring the philosophy of chaos when my anti-order anti-paladin was attempting to impress Pico, the God of Chaos. He stated that to be truly chaotic, you couldn't be anti-order. That would limit chaos by chaining it to another idea even in its opposition. I remember looking up the word "empathy" in high school, as the lich god Scarabeus stated this blinded people from their discovering their true nature.
PvP
Although CF is a roleplaying game, it is also a player versus player (PvP) game. In the old days we called it a "PK" game, short for Player Kill. Your character can be killed and looted by other players. There are some exceptions, such as you can only attack people with a similar amount of experience, but most is fair game once you reach a minimum level. A lot of people roleplay the equivalent of merciless bandits, or fanatic opposers of magic, or zealous destroyers of evil. There is a lot of conflict. Player characters can die several dozen times before their character is permanently dead.
With conflict comes the strategy. Strategy in terms of race, and class customizations, and a wide variety of equipment. With conflict comes tactics. One of the most common commands typed by players is "where pk". This shows you other player characters nearby that are close enough in experience to fight. You had to always be ready; always watching out in case you got jumped so you wouldn't be caught unaware.
Flawed
It wasn't a perfect game. And as I and the game get older, the design flaws became more glaring. It has a steep learning curve, and that curve got worse as the world expanded introducing more and more areas, equipment, monsters, and quests. The time commitment is significant. The curve also got worse as the veteran playerbase became increasingly adept at the game. Even though CF still has great competition, there are games that have better strategy and tactics. However, there are not many games that have as much depth of strategy, tactics, and imagination as CF.
Now the insight.
There is a hole in the RPG market for games that combine actual depth of roleplaying (that is, pretending to be a unique character) and depth of competition.
I don't see games like this on computer, console, or tabletop.
Stuck in the MUD eh? 😂
I used to play Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD) via telnet many many years ago, that was a time of wonder. I don't remember it being so imaginative based though, maybe that was just the server I was on or maybe I wasn't playing it right 😅
CF sounds very cool though.
Good to know! I'm thinking of a project that just might fit this.
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There's an inherent conflict in design aims between depth of a role in terms of immersion and direct competition. For a role, you want a game environment in which failure is acceptable in situations where there is conflict between players, because if failure leads to not getting to play anymore – which is the situation in the majority of game designs – then someone is not having fun. Someone is out. If they can't immediately come back in, that means they're out for the evening (or at least the duration of the session), and that's not a recipe for a good time.
That's why the great majority of games which center on conflict between people at the table have very set, static roles or very light repercussions for failure, the latter of which has a side effect of making "competition" have obviously lower stakes for people who are actively seeking direct competition.
I have played on my share of MUDs (and MUCKs, and MUXes, and –) in my day, and outside of the old LP-style games, there's a good reason that most of them focused on role-playing more than direct conflict.
Competition is hard to design around with continuity.
Which is not to say that it is impossible. I can think of it at least two tabletop role-playing games which deliberately and actively integrate aspects of head-to-head competition in the pursuit of building a better game. Both Universalis and Capes hinge on inter-player competition, but they trade-off individual role identification with players for that advantage.
For the most part, for this sort of game experience you really want to look at the modern board game, which often integrates aspects of role-playing with an expectation of head-to-head competition. If anything, cooperative play is the new innovation in boardgames.
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I hear you, but from my experience with CF I believe to have truly immersive roles, there must be costly failure. Your character's mouth has to be able to write checks that you (and your character's abilities) can't cash. That was the magic of CF. It allowed for uncooperative roleplaying. Many characters developed a nemesis or two. Infamous characters struck fear in you when they logged in.
I do agree that there needs to be a balance on the loss and failure to match player expectations. Investing in characters over a long period creates a strong bond, and has to be managed carefully.
However, games like Pandemic and Dark Souls give me the impression that people don't mind failing if the failure is expected and is enjoyable. Also, deep roleplay helps the bitterness of defeat not taste quite so sour.
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Except for that last part – how long until you get to play some more?
Traditional game design, particularly in the tabletop space but also in the videogame space, has hinged on the idea that death and significant loss of playtime were the best motivators for engagement.
It turns out that's false. It fosters only one kind of engagement, fear of loss of opportunity for play, and fear of loss of investment. But there are other types of role engagement that have a more positive cycle, even if they have negative effects. For example, in Blowback the primary threat to your character is not that you might die – that's actually pretty unlikely unless you really want to. The threat is that you will accumulate negative story influences that you find interesting but which hinder the character's intent.
In games like Pandemic, there is very little threat of long-term loss – it's simple to start up a brand-new game in mere moments and the investiture for restart is low. (It's telling that Pandemic Legacy, which actively involves mechanics for tearing up cards and defacing the board in a long-term, ongoing way, spawned house rules which immediately subverted that intent mere moments after being released.) In Dark Souls, the big threat for death is not that you can no longer play, it's that you will have to replay the portion since the last save point, and that gameplay can lead to a brutal cycle of replay. While it does have a very strong emphasis on challenge, it has absolutely no focus on role. Being interested in your particular role would be actively detrimental to the design, since you are not really intended to maintain it in any real sense.
Investiture in the continuation of a character is often the primary driver of people being risk adverse in gameplay. In a situation where death is just a hindrance, losing the last 30 minutes to an hour of playtime but no more, people are far more willing to engage with the role in many cases. As that sacrifice increases, it's not often that they enjoy the potential of loss; the allure seems to be more in the advertisement of mastery.
The evolution of not just tabletop gaming but video games and their presentation of the repercussions of failure have evolved quite a lot, and overall I have to say they've improved since the days where high defeat threat environments with the potential to lose all of your work were the norm.
Now, it's all about setting up the expectation. Hard-core Mode is an option, not the default setting. That has resulted in video games and tabletop games becoming something more than those things that geeks play in their basement or telnet into; they've become a multibillion-dollar business.
We have to look at what is popular and how it's actually played to draw inferences about what people actually prefer.
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An interesting thing about CF is that no character had permanence. Each death took 1/3 of a point of your Constitution until you died permanently. Even if you avoided dying, all characters would eventually die of old age.
However, the vast majority of characters didn't die from old age or multiple combat defeats. They were deleted.
I'm not advocating for a hardcore mode. Even extremely competitive games aren't primarily a hardcore mode. I am advocating for more competition, more freedom, and more consequences than I typically see in roleplaying games.
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A character architecture in which no character has any particular expectation of long-term viability already sets up for less character identification, working directly against what you said you wanted originally.
One might ask the entirely legitimate question of whether those majority of characters deleted happened soon after creation, representing someone basically abandoning the game because they didn't want to deal with the set up, or characters who had been long present in the game and whose players wanted to delete them to move onto a new one (assuming one player per identity, which is in no way more likely than the other alternative), or just in a fit of pique.
You are going to have to define the context of what you imagine more competition would look like, because "more competition" isn't really well defined. "More freedom," likewise – preferably with some examples of things that you would like to do which you are unable to do in some contexts. And lastly, "more consequences", particularly in tabletop role-playing, are going to be hard to get – because the last 20 years of RPG design outside of D&D and immediate derivatives have been all about "more consequences," to the point where Consequences is a legitimate term of art that refers to a specific game mechanic in some systems.
I can say that, by and large, the markets for games have spoken, and direct competition doesn't seem to be what people want for the most part. Those that do have moved into game contexts which support that primarily, largely first-person shooters, where competition is very contextualized. Long-term consequences go very poorly with increased conflict density which as any element of randomness, because the feeling of getting screwed out of your efforts because of nothing that you did is a great way to turn off someone from engaging further with a game. Even the most casual player can determine when randomness overtakes any decision-making that they have a part of in the play of a game.
There has been some experimentation in that field. Escape From Tarkov is definitely a game which has long-term consequences and direct competition, in the fact that you really only earn progression by bringing of equipment out of these first-person shooter environments, competing with other people. Likewise, in a sense, Fortnite, because there you can come away with more resources and unlock blueprints that you can use in the next game. (Playerunknown's Battlegrounds goes almost the exact opposite direction, being very deliberately disconnected in many ways from one round to another, which at least reassures that some people that if they get screwed this round there's a chance they won't get screwed next round.)
So we really need a better set of definitions of what you're actually looking for, because it very well may already exist and you just don't know about it.
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I agree. But I'm usually ready to move on after 200-400 hours of playing one character anyway. Ready to try another build and put on another skin.
You can see the list here: http://forums.carrionfields.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=28
All of these are for level 30+ out of 51, so none directly after creation. There isn't a limit of 1 char per player, so most are likely due to more interest in another character. (AUTO) means the character was abandoned for an extended period of time. You can click on any name and see how many hours the character had been played.
By more competition, I mean depth of strategy and depth of tactics. Other players provide the best competition, in my opinion.
The top four most popular online games right now are all direct competition, and all have more active users than World of Warcraft: Dota 2, Overwatch, Hearthstone, and League of Legends.
If we're concerned about the overall marketability of this idea, the competition isn't the turn-off. It's the roleplaying. We're probably more likely to pull people into roleplaying by enticing them with competition than the other way around.
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Only 4000 hours huh? lol Well okay I guess that is a lot, about a year and a half of full time (8 hour) days playing. It makes me wonder how many hours I have spent playing and DMing Dungeons and Dragons. I think what attracts me most about the game world you described is that the gods etc. are controlled by other players - that is pretty cool. Player vs. Player can be a really tricky thing - with the right group, it is a ton of fun, but it can also totally ruin friendships - like, real life friendships :)
It was interesting to read your exchange with @lextenebris here, that guy knows a LOT about the RPG industry and I picked up a few things to research farther. Ultimately I personally have long felt that you don't necessarily need to address the competition / PvP aspect in most aspects of game design (instead coming toa group consensus at the gaming table as to what is appropriate), as long as the character creation remains light weight enough that death is not a game killer. For that, and this is definitely out of style these days, I actually truly prefer random character creation. This of course flies in the face of the modern desire to "customize" your character - but if you have never played a random character creation game you may not realize how fun it is to have your character's strengths and weaknesses randomly determined, and how this leads you to a deeper understanding of who your character is. It supports role playing in a way that you might not guess if you have never played a random char gen game.
It is actually my experience that the more customization a game allows, the less people role play their characters. Typically people focus on these elaborate mechanical builds and customizations to achieve this character they have in their heads, but all of this does not actually lead to immersive role playing. On the other hand, if the mechanics of the game do not allow you "construct" your desired character, you have to roleplay the character to be the one you envisioned.
From my own experience playing many different old school variants of D&D (my favorite in this regard being Mutant Future which involves rolling for random mutations a la X-Men), the limitations and restrictions imposed by random char gen force people outside of their typical narrow role play box and I have seen players totally get into characters - players that NEVER really role played in games that featured char gen and leveling up as a mini-game outside of sessions (in essence).
I personally stopped playing video and computer games altogether nearly a decade ago, intentionally, because I decided I would rather focus my gaming time on in person groups. I have never regretted that decision.
Cheers - Carl
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We have a bit of a conflict between two different kinds of "playing a character," here.
On the one hand, "detailed character creation" allows a player to invest the character with the things that they find interesting. In a real sense, and in the best sense, it allows the player to put on the sheet the things that they want other players (and the GM if there is one) to know and pay attention to when they are talking to that player about the character. They act as flags and signals as to what people want to do and the stories they want to engage with. That's a hugely important part of getting people to buy in to the game experience, if that's your interest. After having come up with those signals, they expect those signals to be meaningful and to change their experience. This is where a number of game systems fall down, in fact.
The other form of "playing a character" is what I refer to as "Oracular play." That is, having an external source with a relatively limited number of possible outcomes but of significant combinatorial complexity provide you with prompts to respond to. Taken from that direction, fully randomly generated characters are just a series of prompts which specifically speak to the kind of character that you are directed to engage with, just as they would provide prompts about what a scene may contain, or what a task resolution may involve. There are games which are built almost entirely around Oracular play (like Lady Blackbird), but because the means of interaction is entirely one directional, that mode of play is quite unrewarding for a goodly portion of the gameplaying public. The fact that the way that it's typically mechanized is deliberately exclusive of player choice and interest (aside from the selection of random selection sources, perhaps) makes most of the implementations of much less satisfying for people who prefer to play and the former style.
For myself, I don't want a game to force me to do anything. I don't want to be forced out of my "typical narrow role-play box," in part because I don't have one – but as much a part of it, because I don't think that a mere game designer has the right to lecture me on what "you should be doing to have fun". It comes across as an arrogation, a deliberate belittling of my ability to make decisions for myself. The implications are insulting, even if the game designer never thought for a moment that they would want to insult me.
Yes, choosing to write haiku can be a very liberating, very rewarding experience. Being forced to only write haiku for your own good… Not nearly as much, in my experience.
I love video games. I adore them. I have friends who are well placed at Ubisoft, some at other videogame companies, and we stay in touch fairly regularly. I spent a lot of time playing (and often writing about, elsewhere) video games.
They provide a different experience. I refuse to let myself get nailed down to any particular experience, because I am a creature that likes varied inputs. I like cool stuff, and I cannot lie.
And also, being a long-time adult, it's way order to get a regular gaming group together around jobs, families, and life in general, especially if it involves a fairly significant time sink at any given point. Spread your friend groups across multiple time zones and possibly continents – and video games with their specific contexts start looking pretty good.
If I want to introduce people to serious role-playing, those who have never played before, I sit down with a copy of Kingdom, them, and a couple of other people if I can – and I introduced them to a system in which nothing is random, everything is the result of player choice, they can choose every what and wherefore at any point along the way. Not only that, anything they say that they want to happen within the purview of their role – that's what happens. No ifs, ands, or buts.
It's amazing what kind of results you can get out of people who have never really embraced a role when you give them nothing else to do but that. When you make their decisions directly impactful. When you let them do what they imagine they should be able to do.
Random character generation? That strikes me as not trusting the player. It always makes me feel like I can't be trusted with the reins of narrative power – and I aggressively struggle against that.
(And if I really want to blow the minds of new people, I break out A Penny for My Thoughts and watch everyone who is ever heard of the traditional form of RPG play lose their minds as it does everything in the exact opposite way. I love it. It's such a great convention game.)
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I can see both points of view on this. I probably prefer creating my own characters as opposed to running with randomly generated ones. I like the idea of thinking about the setting, and trying to flesh out certain philosophies, themes, and/or game mechanics. I love that kind of thing.
I can enjoy randomly generated characters too. As GM of a D&D game that is turning two in February, I often have to ad lib or use quickly generated characters when the players decide to take the game a different direction. Some of those quirky NPCs turn out to be the favorites of the party. Being forced into a role you didn't come up with entirely yourself can give you a new perspective, especially when others interact with the role in ways you didn't anticipate.
I have considered doing a mad lib kind of character creation for one-off tabletop games, for a quick and light way to jump into a game.
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To me it is one of those things that I never would have assumed until I actually tried it - I definitely thought I was in the "more options during char gen the better" camp, and kind of scoffed at the old school random char gen methods. Then I actually tried some out in the past decade as I became something of a student of the history of D&D and I quickly realized that in practice, there are some really amazing benefits to random char gen. Not for everyone of course, but coupled with a rules-lite system that allows most of the "character customization" to come just from role playing and improvising within the very minimal guidelines of the rules, random char gen has led to the best gaming experiences of my life. Certainly I play all sorts of styles and am not slavishly adhering to this method at all times and for all purposes, but it was just kind of eye opening to realize that sometimes constricting choices actually spurs creativity, and not the opposite.
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